Few births, exodus wilt east Germany

KARSTAEDT, Germany — At the time of German reunification in 1990, the school in Karstaedt had nearly 1,000 students in grades 1 through 10, making it the largest of four regional schools that served this mainly agricultural area in what had been East Germany.

Today it is the only one of the four that survives. Its enrollment has dwindled to 313, and it will close for good after the 2008 school year.

Karstaedt is hardly unique. More than 2,000 schools in eastern Germany have closed during the past decade. Karstaedt, like many towns in the east, is running out of children -- and hope for a future.

Before reunification, then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl famously promised that the east would soon enjoy "blossoming landscapes," thanks to a massive subsidy from the western part of the country. But in the five states of the former East Germany, falling birthrates and a population exodus have combined to produce a demographic cataclysm that experts say will cause scores of villages, towns and entire regions to simply wither and die.

This has happened despite a huge transfer of wealth -- about $2 trillion over the last 17 years -- from Germany's prosperous west to the ex-communist east.

"You have to accept that there's really not much more you can do," said Reiner Klingholz, an analyst at the Berlin Institute for World Population and Global Development. "You have to concentrate on promising regions, which means you have to abandon unpromising regions."

A new study by the Berlin Institute paints a profoundly unpromising picture of the region.

For the last three decades, birthrates in Germany have lingered at 1.37 children per woman, one of the lowest in the world and far below the 2.1 figure that is seen as the benchmark for stable population growth. In eastern Germany, however, the birthrate plummeted to 0.77 in the years after reunification, the lowest level ever recorded.

The numbers in the east have recovered slightly, to 1.2 births per woman, but that is still the second-lowest in Europe; only Vatican City state has a lower birthrate.

Economics-driven exodus

The low birthrate has been compounded by a massive out-migration. More than 1.5 million have left the east for the west since 1991, and after a brief slowdown in the late 1990s, the outflow is picking up again.

Second-tier cities such as Halle, Rostock, Cottbus and Magdeburg have lost about a fifth of their population over the last decade. By 2030 they will have doubled their losses.

The exodus is driven by economics. In the former East Germany, the unemployment rate is nearly 20 percent, more than double the national figure. In some rural areas of the east, it is closer to 30 percent.

"Those who are leaving are mainly the young, the qualified and the females," Klingholz said.

The out-migration of women is particularly pronounced and problematic. Across eastern Germany, the ratio of young females to males is 89-100. In some rural districts it has fallen as low as 76-100.

One reason for this is that decades of communism have taught East German women that their place is in the workplace. Another, perhaps more important, is that girls do better in school.

"Girls tend to be more willing to accept academic challenges," said Axel Knuth, principal of the school in Karstaedt, about 80 miles northwest of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg. "Girls are better students, and their opportunities are better elsewhere. The boys tend to want to stay home at Hotel Mom."

According to government statistics, females from the east who go on to university outnumber their male counterparts by nearly 50 percent. Most males in the east end their education after 10th grade.

Better-equipped to find jobs in the west, women from the east are leaving in droves, and leaving the men behind.

Juliane Repsch is typical. The 19-year-old from Prenzlau, another town in Brandenburg, is leaving in August to start an internship as a bank clerk in Bremen.

"Most of my friends have already left for the west or are planning to leave, mostly the girls. For the male friends, only the best ones are gone, so the choice for girls is not great here," she said. "For us girls, career comes first; for the boys it's the friends, the family, the place they feel at home. Girls are quicker and more decisive on the question of leaving for better opportunities."

As the crisis draws increasing attention from the German news media, the left-behind males of the east tend to be tagged with a "loser" label.

Udo Staeck, Karstaedt's mayor, says the label is unfair.

"Males are more conservative, and maybe they are thinking more rationally," he said. "The salaries may be higher in Hamburg or Berlin, but here it is cheaper to live. It's better for families."

But with dim economic prospects, these males do not make promising marriage prospects, and with females in short supply, there is not much hope for starting a family.

Subsidies an uphill battle

These days, former Chancellor Kohl's promises of "blossoming landscapes" are recalled with irony.

"We learned that you can't subsidize against a demographic trend," Klingholz said.

The subsidies are supposed to continue until 2019.

In Karstaedt, evidence of the largesse can be seen in the town's new municipal building and the face-lifts that have been given to some of the old industrial buildings near the railroad tracks. But the spruced-up buildings still have no tenants, and the few new industries that have located here have not brought much in the way of jobs.

Elsewhere in Brandenburg, as the human population recedes, the animal kingdom is recovering lost territory. The crane and the white-tailed eagle have reappeared, and wolves, absent for more than a century, now roam the forests of Brandenburg and eastern Saxony.

"Unlike the people in this area," the Berlin Institute study notes, "the wolves have enough offspring that their future existence is guaranteed."